Canada has an effective trade agreement with all of our significant trading partners in the WTO, but its rules are slow to adapt to the rapidly changing economic realities analyzed in other chapters in this volume. As trade negotiators experiment with alternatives in a G-zero world without a...

Standards and regulations have externalities for other governments, citizens, and economic actors. The vector for those externalities is international trade, which is the reason that trade agreements usually contain obligations both on the substance of domestic regulations and on how standards...

Trade and trade policy are central to transforming our world, the objective of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Trade can make a crucial contribution to sustainable development objectives, including economic growth and poverty reduction, but requires a coherent policy framework that...

China, the EU and the U.S. are the world’s largest traders, and many of the tensions in the trading system arise in the relations among them. Our premise is that reforming WTO is a necessary condition for the organization to be a more salient forum for the three large economies to address...

This paper takes the importance of asking about accountability for granted, and looks only at the WTO. The immediate objective is to ask who might be accountable at WTO, which requires considering what sort of entity WTO is, in the next section, and then extending an analytic framework developed...

With its dispute settlement system in peril, the role of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in mitigating commercial conflict is more important than ever, but its working practices need reform, notably procedures for discussing trade concerns. The Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS) and...

Nothing is agreed until everything is agreed. Negotiations in the World Trade Organization (WTO) proceed simultaneously, not sequentially, and all Members must accept all the results. I show that the so-called Single Undertaking is both a negotiation technique and a constitutive metaphor. It...

Economic stress is often thought to be a source of protectionism, which motivated Leaders of the new G-20 to promise repeatedly that they would refrain from trade restrictions in response to the global financial crisis that became apparent in 2008. They also promised to hold themselves...

China, the EU and the U.S. are the world’s largest traders, and many of the tensions in the trading system arise in the relations among them. Our premise is that reforming WTO is a necessary condition for the organization to be a more salient forum for the three large economies to address...